The Beta-prelaunch period for Frozen Synapse 2 is slowly heating up. As part of our prelaunch activities and along other content we have coming up for you in the near future, we will hold a Frozen Synapse 1 tournament with some magnificient prizes and the chance for some lucky winners to grab some FS2 Beta invites!

However, before the tournament kicks off, you can win a Frozen Synapse 2 Beta key, by designing a Frozen Synapse 1 map that will be used in the elimination round of the tournament - so without further ado, I'll introduce our first Frozen Synapse Map Making Contest (Drawings, pictures and real life miniatures are valid submissions)!

Many thanks for the recent feedback on the UI - has been really helpful and is much appreciated.

Thought I would update you about some changes we're thinking of making based on your feedback and our own appraisal of the situation.

None of this is final; all of it may not happen! That's the end of the caveats. Here's what we're planning on doing:

- A fundamental mechanics change to aiming and shooting which will be announced soon! This adds a new level of depth to the game and is very fun to play with. It may not feature in every mode but early tests are encouraging - Ian will be explaining this system soon when some issues have been worked out.

- Time handles replaced with wait orders. Wait orders are issued using the dragging functionality from time handles, but you do not place orders directly on the handles; you simply create a wait, then place your order in the stack after it. Time handles have always sucked to interact with directly, but dragging left to right is still the best way of defining an amount of time quickly; this should alleviate the former while retaining the latter.

- Units will have a "selection handle", which is a larger clickable element attached to the unit by a line. Selection handles will avoid overlapping with other UI elements meaning that you won't have the problem of trying to distinguish between two overlapping units.

- Probably something to make "check" less terrible to use

- Hopefully some better scaling of the aim handle so it's less tiny when zoomed out

We're looking at trying to make some improvements to the Frozen Synapse UI in FS2.

This is a difficult topic: Frozen Synapse is a very complex game; some elements of UI design are subjective; making changes to our UI is difficult and time consuming.

So, please don't take it as a negative if we don't manage to incorporate your feedback.

I'd like to know what you find difficult to do in the game, both in-game and in the menus, what you find fiddly especially. Feel free to post anything you want, but in general flagging up problems is a lot more useful to us than suggesting solutions.

Thanks for taking the time to do this.

If you wanted to me AMAZINGLY helpful, a video demonstrating your problems would be great but any notes or comments are more than welcome.